Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/292

272 a few narrowly restricted rights, which were far less practical and palpable than the acquisitions of the nobility, and which not one in a thousand probably had the wisdom to value; but they formed a pledge and earnest of the future. Hitherto the metœci had been politically nothing, the old burgesses had been everything; now that the former were embraced in the community, the old burgesses were overcome; for much as might be wanting to full civil equality, it is the first breach, not the occupation of the last post, that decides the fall of the fortress. With justice therefore the Roman community dated its political existence from the beginning of the consulship.

While however the republican revolution may, notwithstanding the aristocratic rule which in the first instance it established, be justly called a victory of the former metœci or the plebs, the revolution even in this respect bore by no means the character which we are accustomed in the present day to designate as democratic. In the senate indeed there now sat more plebeians than before; yet pure personal merit without the support of birth and wealth could perhaps gain admittance to the senate more easily under the regal government than under that of the patriciate. The nature of the case implied that the governing aristocratic order, so far as it admitted plebeians at all, would grant the right of occupying seats in the senate not absolutely to the ablest men, but chiefly on the contrary to the heads of the wealthy and notable plebeian families; and the families thus admitted jealously guarded the possession of their senatorial stalls. While a complete legal equality therefore had subsisted within the old burgess-body, the new burgess-body or former metœci came to be in this way divided from the first into a number of privileged families and a multitude kept in a position of inferiority. But the power of the community now according to the centurial organization came into the hand of that class, which since the Servian reform of the army and of taxation had borne mainly the burdens of the state, namely the freeholders, and therefore in the main neither into the hands of the great proprietors nor into those of the small cottagers, but into those of the intermediate class of farmers—an arrangement in which the seniors were still so far privileged that, although less numerous, they had as many voting-divisions as the juniors. While in this way the axe was laid to the root of the old burgess-body and their